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Null-Subject Properties of Slavic Languages

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Null-Subject Properties of Slavic Languages Slavistische Beiträge ∙ Band 361 (eBook - Digi20-Retro) Martina Lindseth Null-Subject Properties of Slavic Languages With Special Reference to Russian, Czech and Sorbian Verlag Otto Sagner München ∙ Berlin ∙ Washington D.C. Digitalisiert im Rahmen der Kooperation mit dem DFG-Projekt „Digi20“ der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, München. OCR-Bearbeitung und Erstellung des eBooks durch den Verlag Otto Sagner: http://verlag.kubon-sagner.de © bei Verlag Otto Sagner. Eine Verwertung oder Weitergabe der Texte und Abbildungen, insbesondere durch Vervielfältigung, ist ohne vorherige schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages unzulässig. «Verlag Otto Sagner» ist ein Imprint der Kubon & Sagner GmbHMartina. Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 00052018 S lavistische Beiträge Begründet von Alois Schmaus Herausgegeben von Peter Rehder Beirat: Tilman Berger • Walter Breu • Johanna Renate Döring-Smimov Wilfried Fiedler • Walter Koschmal • Ulrich Schweier • MiloS Sedmidubskÿ * Klaus Steinke BAND 361 V erla g O tto Sa gner Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 M ünchen Downloaded 1998 from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 00052018 Martina Lindseth Null-Subject Properties of Slavic Languages With Special Reference to Russian, Czech and Sorbian V erla g O tto S a g n er Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 M ünchen 1998Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access PVA 98. 2677 ISBN 3-87690-699-7 © Verlag Otto Sagner, München 1998 Abteilung der Firma Kubon & Sagner D-80328 München Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem PapierMartina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 00052018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work originates from my Ph.D. thesis which I defended at Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A. in 1996. I would like to thank all members of my dissertation committee, especially Dr. Steven Franks, for guiding me through my graduate studies at IU and the preparation of my dissertation. I would also like to express my graditute to the scholars at the Serbski institut in Budyšin. Special thanks go to Dr. Irene Šērak for helping me find native speakers for my fieldwork, and for reading portions of the manu- script, and to Dr. Helmut Faßke for allowing me access to some of his recent data. I would also like to thank Erik for all his sup- port and patience while I was working on the dissertation, and Pat for proofing the book manuscript. This research was supported in part by an IU International Programs Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, an IU College of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Fellowship, a Wabash College Faculty Devel- opment Grant and an American Council of Learned Societies Disserta- tion Fellowship. All financial help was greatly appreciated and allowed me to expand the project far beyond my original goals. This book is dedicated to my father. Dr. Siegfried Profe, who always rejoiced in my successes. He would have celebrated the com- pletion of this work. Eau Claire, Wisconsin, summer 1998 Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. INTRODUCTION.......................................... 1 I .X. The issue of null nubjects 1.2. Slavic languages and universal grammar 1.3. Organization 2. NULL SUBJECTS IN THE GOVERNMENT BINDING FRAMEWORK...... 8 2.1. Theoretical background 2.2. Are null subjects more than just nothing? 2.3. Development of the pro-drop parameter 2.4. Null-subject diagnostics 3. NULL - SUBJECT CHARACTERISTICS OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES...... 4 0 3.1. Application of null-subject diagnostics 3.1.1. West Slavic and South Slavic 3.1.2. Russian (East Slavic) 3.2. Why is Russian different? 3.2.1. The intuitive explanation 3.2.2. How to formalize the difference between Russian and West and South Slavic 3.3. Summary 4. IS SORB IAN A Pro-DROP LANGUAGE? ...................... 73 4.1. The Sorbian population of Germany 4.2. Verbal morphology of Upper Sorbian 4.3. Grammar vs. Reality 4.4. Application of null-subject diagnostics 4.5. Pronouns and purism 4.6. Why is Sorbian not a canonical null-subject language? 4.6.1. Identification and the number of syncretisms 4.6.2. A word order account 4.6.3. Challenges for the identification/licensing framework 4.6.4. The competition model and the loss of pro-drop Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 000Б2018 -VII- 4.7. Lower Sorbian 4.8. Summary 5. THE STATUS OF OVERT EXPLETIVES IN CZECH AND SORBIAN... 14 4 5.1. Licensing/identification and the typology of languages 5.2. Spoken Czech 5.2.1. Syntactic status of overt expletives 5.2.2. Origin and meaning of Czech expletives 5.3. Upper Sorbian 5.3.1. Syntactic status of overt expletives 5.3.2. Historical perspective 5.3.3. Upper Sorbian and German 5.4. Summary 6. CONCLUSION ......................................... 196 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 198 Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access ־׳ fA ■דד te ^ I& ísz 'VUÍV^* Ч-5Й Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 00052018 ־1־ 1. INTRODUCTION 1*1• The issue of null subjects It is readily apparent that languages vary according to whether an unstressed pronominal subject of a finite clause is lexi- calized (English, French) or not (Spanish, Italian). This study derives from and contributes to the large corpus of recent research by generative grammarians which has sought to explain this crosslinguistic variation in the occurrence of null subjects. In a broader sense this work is part of an even larger tradition since generative syntacticians were certainly not the first to concern themselves with the zero-problem in lin- guistics. Indeed, the concept of zero-elements (also called null elements or phonologically empty elements) has been pre- viously invoked by many linguists belonging to different schools of linguistics, including those of the French linguist de Saussure and his students, Jakobson and the Prague functio- nalists, and Bloomfield and the American Structuralists. As a result Meier (1961) was able to devote an entire monograph in which he included ,״to the "Zéro-Problem in der Linguistik a survey of "Zéro-Spezial-Arbeiten" and a survey of the histo- ry of this topic in linguistics. For generative linguists, null subjects have proven to be a fruitful topic of debate ever since Perlmutter's Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax (1971). Since one of the central concerns of the "principles and parameters" model Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 00052018 -2- of government and binding (GB) theory has been to determine positions in which overt and phonologically empty manifesta- tions of different NP types can occur, defining the precise nature of the crosslinguistic variation in the availability of empty subjects has been of special interest to GB, generating numerous articles and several books, such as Bouchard (1984), Roberge (1990), and Jaeggli and Safir (1989). Traditionally, Italian has been cited as an example of the canonical null-subject or pro-drop languages which are clearly identifiable as different from canonical overt subject languages, such as English, as illustrated in (1). (1) parlo I speak parli you speak parla he speaks parliamo we speak parlate you speak parlano they speak Since the Italian inflectional paradigm uniquely distinguishes all person/number combinations, it is intuitively clear, in- dependent from any specific grammatical framework, why Italian can afford to do without overt subject pronouns: The pronomi- nal features (person, number) of a "missing" subject can be recovered unambiguously due to the rich inflectional agreement on the verb. Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access However, with the eventual spread of theoretically in- formed generative studies to more and more languages, it be- came apparent that the situation is far more complex than expected. It is now clear that the relationship between rich agreement and null subjects is less direct than originally assumed. On the one hand, there are languages like German, which seem to have what we would call rich agreement, but fail to allow referential null subjects, while on the other hand, there are languages like Japanese and Chinese, which are quite capable of omitting subject pronouns, despite their lack of agreement morphology. Further research revealed that some languages (such as German, Icelandic and Russian) can show mixed behavior with respect to the pro-drop parameter. In German, for instance, referential subjects and quasi-argumental1 subjects are not omitted, whereas truly expletive subjects are. (2) ich/*0 liebe Tiere '(I) love animals1 (3) draußen regnet es/*0 schon wieder ,outside it is raining again* (4) ich bin froh, daß 0/*вв getanzt wird 1I am happy that there is dancing going on' 1 As pointed out by Chomsky (1981: 325), quasi-argu- ments have some properties of true arguments (e.g. control of PRO) and some properties of non-arguments (cannot be replaced by referential NPs) and thus behave differently than truly expletive subjects. Martina Lindseth - 9783954790661 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 02:50:54AM via free access 00052018 -4- Thus there is in fact no clearcut division between null- subject and non-null-subject languages. Despite the longstand- ing intuition that there is a relationship between richness of agreement and the availability of null subjects in a specific grammar, a definitive and completely accurate characterization of the notion of inflectional richness has yet to be proposed. 1.2. Slavic languages and universal grammar The theoretical parts of this work are conceived within the syntactic framework of GB theory, initiated by Chomsky (1981, 1982) as a development of earlier versions of generative gram- mar and further refined during the past decade.
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